32 Surprising Things That You Can Compost

Posted on January 9, 2015 by robbie

Chances are, even if you’re a recycling-all-star, you’re probably new to the wild world of composting. This practice, which turns common household items into all-natural, nutrient-rich mulch, is beneficial to the environment in countless ways: from reducing the need for fertilizer to fighting climate change. While many surprising things can be tossed directly into a compost heap (old latex party balloons, for one), some items might only decompose when placed in advanced composters, and others will cause more harm than good.
Since it’s the new year, and you’re all about making resolutions to better yourself (that is, to eat more whole grains, hit up the gym), why not resolve to improve the health of the earth, too? This tip sheet will help you determine what items can stay out of your trash and become composting treasure.

Compost this

Balloons, as long as they are latex, are fully compostable.

Fruit and vegetable scraps (including banana peels, citrus rinds, moldy lettuce and even jack-o’-lanterns). Tip: Breaking things down in a blender first can speed up the composting process.
Stale or moldy bread, crackers and cereal. Tip: These items can attract unwanted pets, so bury them deep in your pile or use a composter with a lid.
Wine, beer and liquor.
The liquid from canned fruits and vegetables.
Old herbs and spices.
Coffee grounds and paper coffee filters.
Tea and teabags.
Jam, jelly and other fruit preserves.
Balloons, gloves and condoms made from latex.
Hair and nail clippings.
Feathers and fur from pets.
Old ropes and ripped up cloth made of natural fibers, such as wool or cotton.
Cotton balls and swabs made from 100 percent cotton.
Natural corks from wine bottles.
Plant trimmings and clipped grass that’s free from toxins like pesticides or weed killer.
Unwanted potting soil.
Finely chopped wood chips and bark.
Leaves, twigs, pine cones and evergreen needles. (Your Christmas tree can also be composted — provided that you can break it down in a wood chipper first.)
Hay and straw.
Matches, toothpicks and bamboo skewers.
Compostable utensils and dishware. Tip: Break these up into pieces.
Shredded plain paper (think: bills and credit-card-statements), notebook paper written on with pencil or pens with soy- or vegetable-based inks, cardboard and newspaper.
Used paper towels, napkins and tissues, as long as they haven’t been used during an illness, such as the flu or a cold, or used to clean up chemicals.
Dry pet food.
Hamster bedding.
Dead plants and flowers.
Nuts and their shells (except walnut shells, which can be toxic to some plants).
Algae, seaweed and kelp.
White glue (such as Elmer’s), papier-mâché and masking tape.
Cellophane, but make sure it’s the real plant-based variety and not plastic wrap.
Natural loofahs and sea sponges.
Wood ash from your fireplace.

Skip this

Meats can cause bad odor and pest problems in a compost bin.

Meat, fish and bones, which produce foul odors and attract rodents and bugs. Tip: Your local recycling or composting facility, however, might accept them.
Eggs and dairy products such as cheese, butter and yogurt, which also attract pests.
Oils, grease, salad dressing and peanut butter. These items don’t break down easily and could upset the liquid balance of your compost.
Cigarette butts that are made of plastic.
Store-bought soaps and shampoos, which contain dyes, perfumes and chemicals that will contaminate your pile.
Black-walnut tree leaves or twigs and oleander leaves, which are toxic to plants.
Pet waste or cat litter, which may contain disease or parasites that could be passed on to humans.
Diseased or insect-ridden plants. They can regrow in your compost pile and be transferred back into your garden.
Weed seeds and invasive weeds, which can sprout in your compost pile.
Glossy magazines, colored paper, wrapping paper that may be coated in wax or other synthetic materials and paper that’s covered with inks or dyes (for instance, the ink from Rollerball pens and Sharpies are toxic). Recycle these items instead.
Used personal products such as diapers, tampons and feminine napkins.
Coated cardboard, paper cups, milk cartons and juice boxes, since they’re often lined with wax, plastic or other synthetic chemicals.
Leather goods, including belts and gloves. In theory, they’ll decompose, but it will take many, many years.
Charcoal ash from your grill, which could contain chemicals.
Baked goods, cooked grains, rice and pasta, which can be a breeding ground for bacteria and attract pests.
Dryer lint or vacuum cleaner contents. The tiny plastic or synthetic fibers shed from clothing or carpets could contaminate your compost.

Can a Little Bit of Compost Help Fight Climate Change?

Posted on October 27, 2014 by robbie

There are plenty of reasons why compost is beneficial to the environment. This nutrient-rich mulch enriches soil and helps plants grow, reduces the need for fertilizers and as it turns out, can also play a big role in reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
Experiments conducted on a Marin County ranch found that a single layer of compost has significantly increased the soil’s ability to store carbon (an effect that’s been observed for the last six years), the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
If scaled up, this eco-friendly solution could potentially slash California’s carbon pollution. According to the research, if compost were applied to a mere 5 percent of California’s grazing lands, the soil could capture a whole year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s farm and forestry industries. Researcher and bio-geochemist Whendee Silver theorized to the San Francisco Chronicle that if compost were applied to 25 percent of California’s grazing land, the soil could absorb a whopping three-quarters of the state’s annual emissions.
Here’s how it works: Compost nourishes plant growth. And as a plant grows, it sucks in the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Carbon, as well as being used to create new plant tissue, is also pushed into the soil via the roots.
Compost helps cut greenhouse gases in other ways as well. We’ve mentioned that composting helps divert unwanted food scraps and other organic material from the landfills, which are the U.S.’s third largest source of methane emissions behind the oil and gas and agriculture industries.
The Marin county composting experiment has also benefited the land in other ways. Ranch owner John Wick has observed an increase in native birds and plants, as well as green grass year round (which is especially remarkable in a state that’s experiencing a historic drought).
So if composting is so great, why hasn’t California (and other states) spread the solution? Well, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains, even though the process is relatively low-tech, it requires a lot of time and money.
However, many cities such as Denver; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore., and New York City have compost-collecting programs. And in San Francisco and Seattle, residents are fined if they fail to compost. So as more cities and states green up, there will certainly be much more mulch to spread around.
DON’T MISS: Want to Throw Food Away in This City? It’ll Cost You

Want to Throw Food Away in This City? It’ll Cost You

Posted on October 15, 2014 by robbie

There’s a new contender for greenest city in America. Seattle’s City Council unanimously passed a new policy that will fine businesses and residents for not composting.
Starting Jan. 1, 2015, all Seattle residents and commercial establishments must separate food waste and compostable paper for recycling — meaning these items can’t get sent to the landfills like regular garbage. With the new regulation, the city’s trash collectors can hand out tickets if they find a trash bin with more than 10 percent compostable waste. “After receiving two warnings, residents and businesses will be fined $50 for dumpsters and a more modest $1 for waste at single-family homes,” CNN reports.
Even though a $1 fine isn’t very much (for comparison’s sake, San Francisco fines its residents up to $100 for failing to compost), Seattle isn’t actually trying to make money off of trash violators. Rather, the city wants to stress to its residents the importance of recycling. As Tim Croll (Seattle Public Utilities’ solid-waste director) tells the Seattle Times, the city has collected less than $2,000 in fines since it outlawed recyclable items from the trash a whole nine years ago.
“The point isn’t to raise revenue,” Croll adds. “We care more about reminding people to separate their materials.”
MORE: The State That Has Made It Illegal to Throw Away Unwanted Food
Seattle has a goal of recycling 60 percent of waste by 2015 and 70 percent by 2022. However, its recycling rate for 2013 was at 56 percent, which fell a little short of the city’s target, the Times reports. The new law should generate an additional 38,000 tons of compost material every year, hopefully putting the city back on track.
Food and paper waste is a huge, expensive problem for the whole of America. We’ve previously reported that more than any other material thrown away by Americans, paper has the biggest presence in landfills. According to the EPA, paper takes up the largest chuck of solid municipal solid waste at 27 percent. As for our food scraps, a staggering 40 percent of the food in this country is completely wasted, or about 36 million tons of food annually, setting us back $165 billion in wasted costs per year.
Seattle’s continued efforts reduce waste is something that other cities should aspire to.
DON’T MISS: 6 Common Environmental Culprits That Need Regulation

The One-Of-A-Kind Oregon Festival That Is Friendly to the Environment and Music Lovers Alike

Posted on August 15, 2014 by robbie

You can’t buy a water bottle at the annual Pickathon Music Festival, held on a private 80-acre farm on the outskirts of Portland, Ore. Rather, you can buy a water bottle — but only of the stainless steel, reusable variety.
You can’t buy food served on paper plates, either. You have to ask for a napkin if you want one. And the vendors don’t sell bottles of Coke or cans of Sprite. Everything you eat at Pickathon — unless it’s brought in from your own campsite — is served on a blue bamboo plate, its circular edges rounded into a shallow bowl shape. And the utensils used to serve the legendary Pine State Biscuits or scrumptious Bollywood Theater cucumber beet salad into festivalgoers’ salivating mouths? They’re also made of bamboo, with a spoon at one end and a fork at the other. The craft beers from local breweries and the Riesling from local wineries are served in stainless steel cups designed by Klean Kanteen to minimize foam and insulated to stay cool. Alongside every trash and recycling container is a five-gallon compost bucket, lined with a compostable bag and emptied throughout each of the festival’s three days by a legion of 53 volunteers.
[ph]
A permanent solar array mounted atop the Galaxy Barn (one of Pickathon’s seven venues) supplies not only the stage inside but also all the food and craft vendors on the farm with electricity, and three solar generators power the lights and giant lanterns dotting the trails between the camping areas. One of the stages is constructed almost entirely of recycled wooden pallets. Another, appropriately named the Woods stage, is tucked deep into the trees and features a dome above the performers built from curling tree branches. Its audience sits atop burlap sacks draped over hay bales.
[ph]
MORE: Help Your Favorite Spot Go Solar With Just One Click
Pickathon is unique among the world’s music festivals for a dozen reasons: its 3,500 attendees are so amicable and well behaved that organizers aren’t forced to play the heavy at stage area checkpoints. Lines are often blissfully short, and musical acts are carefully curated not for their Grammy potential but their raw talent. Pickathon’s band lineup is about the next big thing — not the flavor of the week — and it makes for a real sense of discovery for music fans.
But what truly sets Pickathon apart from other music festivals is how environmentally sustainable it is. And while it may be hard to imagine scaling the aforementioned green innovations to a festival the size of Coachella or Bonnaroo, where hundreds of thousands flock to see the hottest bands on the planet play a live set, it shouldn’t be, insists co-founder Zale Schoenborn: “You just have to set it up to succeed.”
Pickathon began in 1998 at a small venue called Horning’s Hideout, with less than 100 people. The idea was never to make it big, but to make it better than some of the niche-oriented, profit-focused festivals in other parts of the country.
“We just wanted the art of the better party,” said Schoenborn, who created the festival with a few friends. The idea was to put together an event for local and up-and-coming bands that spanned musical genres. “People come to Pickathon knowing we curate the best of the music worlds we try to go after.”
The organizers were all green-minded, but in the early days, they had a venue with existing infrastructure, so there wasn’t much room to innovate.
After seven years, land use issues forced Pickathon to move to a site in nearby Woodburn, to a place called Pudding River, where a “ginormous field with nothing on it” lay, Schoenborn says. The blank slate “made us really create a whole different thing.”
Stages were built from scratch, and Pickathon’s founders began to ponder what this new autonomy might allow them to accomplish. But after just a year at Pudding River, more land use problems required the festival to search for its third home, eventually settling at an 80-acre farm in Happy Valley that is owned by Sherry and Scott Pendarvis. “Bohemian, wonderful people,” as Schoenborn describes them.
Like the previous site, the farm wasn’t set up to host a music festival, so it was up to Schoenborn and his crew to build it. They erected custom-designed stages and a shade structure made entirely of tensioned fabric to keep music fans cool at the ninth annual event, which was held in 2006.
As Oregonians, holding an event that was light on the land was an important part of Pickathon’s ethic, so it has always had a heavy emphasis on recycling. But even serving beer in recyclable plastic cups resulted in the distribution of tens of thousands of cups and bottles in a single weekend. There had to be a better way, Schoenborn figured.
[ph]
The following year, that number dropped to zero.
Via Pickathon’s blog, Schoenborn asked festivalgoers if they would be willing to consider some kind of single-use container, something they’d buy once at the outset and then carry with them from stage to stage. Overwhelmingly, respondents said yes.
So Schoenborn and Pickathon’s other organizations reached out to Klean Kanteen, makers of a line of reusable food-grade stainless steel products, who in turn, designed a steel pint cup, which sells at the festival for $6. Organizers set up a dozen or more filtered water refill stations strategically placed throughout the farm, so that people wouldn’t have to wait in long lines to fill their cups (or their own water bottles.) Even that first year, Schoenborn says, the idea went off without a hitch, and Pickathon became the first music festival in the world to implement such a system. “It was flawless,” he says.
[ph]
The next innovation was those bamboo plates, a far trickier challenge than the cups. While the cups are fairly easy to tote around the venue — Klean Kanteen also sells a silicon accessory that loops around the rim of the container and can attach to a belt buckle via carabiner to aid in the process — imagine having to lug around a whole plate and a bamboo spork for an entire weekend.
Enter the token system. Before purchasing any food at Pickathon, you must first visit a station that distributes a wooden coin about the size of a quarter, for $10. Then, you take that token to a food booth, hand it over (along with additional cash for your food), and receive a meal served on a bamboo plate. Once you’ve eaten, you can either wash the plate yourself at a nearby dishwashing station and keep it, or head back to the token station, where you return the plate (someone else will wash it) and receive your wooden coin back.
If that sounds complicated, it really isn’t. First-time festival-goers do require some explanation and vendors had some difficulty understanding that they couldn’t choose what dishware to serve their food on, everyone picked up the concept quickly, Schoenborn says.
[ph]
Those two steps alone — replacing all the single-use dishware and plastic cups with reusable materials — have helped reduce Pickathon’s landfill impact by about a dumpster load, Hofeld told NationSwell.
DON’T MISS: Thirst Quenchers: Step Away from the Trash Can
“My job keeps getting easier,” he says.
But he and the festival’s organizers remain on the hunt for new ways to reduce the event’s environmental footprint.
Pickathon itself creates very little landfill waste, but the festival goers still bring in loads of their own stuff for their campsites: individually-wrapped snacks, cans and bottles, anything you might tote along to a camping trip. Plus, people leave things behind, such as tents that break during the weekend, chairs and tennis shoes. Once, an abandoned sewing machine remained.
“The majority of the trash is coming from the campers, not from the event,” Hofeld said. “Camping is messy business. That’s why we can’t be a zero-waste event.”
Organizers could ask people to “pack it out” (the way you would on a backpacking trip), that only reduces the amount of trash Pickathon hauls away, not the amount of trash generated. Plus, part of the festival’s charm is that it’s not a place where someone is always telling you what to do: “We don’t want to get too preachy,” Hofeld says.
The event partners with Clackamas County and the local trash hauling company Hood View Disposal, which provides the waste collection equipment gratis, but if it’s not recyclable as a curbside pickup back in Portland, it has to go in the landfill. And because it’s so labor-intensive to sort out the less obvious recyclable material — the plastic packing of a dozen apples from Trader Joe’s, for example — there’s actually less product that can be easily tossed in a recycling bin today than there was a few years ago, Hofeld says, so it’s mostly bottles and cans that go in those containers.
Composting is a different story, though. Four years ago, the festival convinced the local trash company to drop a compost bin at the festival. Recycling crewmembers fan out throughout the festival grounds, informing people what can and can’t be composted. Food is an obvious choice; paper, though compostable, stays out, because the hauler can’t collect it. Compostable items from the campsites (which are scattered throughout the woods) aren’t gathered because it’s not worth the effort.
[ph]
Pickathon’s sustainability works well in part because it takes place in part of the country whose population is already well attuned to the ethic of recycling, Hofeld says. Much of what makes the system work here, then, is that there’s a well-oiled infrastructure already in place to receive all those recyclables.
As awareness about climate change increases, though, there is growing interest in sustainability across America, and part of that movement includes making music festivals easier on the environment. Both Schoenborn and Hofeld regularly field calls from their counterparts at events across the country, and they tend to give the same advice to everyone: Whatever you do, go all in. If you design an optional system — selling stainless cups but also plastic water bottles, for example — it won’t work.
For music lovers, the options are a little more complex. Convincing your favorite festival to go greener may be more about convincing the county that hosts it to provide more recycling options. After all, festivals can’t recycle what their trash collector doesn’t haul. But a good first step, suggests Hofeld, is to contact your state representative to lobby for better recycling options in your home state.
Or, journey to Oregon, for next year’s Pickathon.
EVEN MORE: New York City Wants to Collect Your Leftovers

New York City Wants to Collect Your Leftovers

Posted on April 18, 2014 by robbie

If you live in Portland, Oregon, or Berkeley, California, you’re probably used to collecting your banana peels, eggshells, and coffee grinds in a plastic bag and putting them on the street corner for the city to collect. Residents of New York City will soon have the same joyful composting opportunity.
The New York City Department of Sanitation and Glad Products (of “don’t get mad, get Glad” fame) announced Thursday that they will be expanding their organic collections pilot program, according to CBS New York.
The program is voluntary and will reach 70,000 homes in the coming months. That means that brown plastic containers for organic food waste will appear on the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Queens in the near future. Anyone who chooses to participate can collect food scraps in their home and put them out on collection day. The pilot project will be introduced in the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Glendale, Middle Village, and Maspeth.
Deputy Sanitation Commissioner Ron Gonen told CBS New York that the city spent $85 million to transport organic waste to landfills last year. But he says the cost is worth it: “That organic material can be converted to compost, which is an organic fertilizer that the city can sell. Or it could be converted into clean, natural gas,” he told CBS.
An expanding compost pilot program is great news for all New Yorkers. Whether you’re a committed gardener looking for nutrient-rich fertilizer, or a father of five who hates tossing leftover food in the trash, the opportunity to throw organic waste into a bin on the street will be a welcome one. So start saving those banana peels.

An Oasis in One of America’s Largest Food Deserts: the Local Quick Mart

Posted on February 7, 2014 by robbie

The Quick Mart on Williamsburg Road in Richmond, Va., is your typical corner store. It does a brisk business in cigarettes and newspapers, along with convenience foods, like Cheez-Its and potato chips. It’s located in the city’s Greater Fulton neighborhood, which means its customers are mostly low income. There is one thing that sets the Quick Mart apart from other shops, though: It’s the only place within a nearly two-mile radius where customers can buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
Since May 2013, the Quick Mart has been stocking a portable refrigerator with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuces and other seasonal fruits and vegetables. Every week it receives a delivery from Tricycle Gardens, a local nonprofit whose mission is to grow healthy foods and get them on people’s plates in low-income Richmond neighborhoods. On a busy Monday afternoon last October, the Quick Mart fridge was empty, save for a couple of handfuls of okra and some collard greens.
“Everything’s selling,” says store owner Ayad Nasher, 26. “Whatever I got there in the cooler, they want it. I’ve been explaining to people that we have fresh vegetables now because we didn’t have it before, and they love it.”
MORE: Hungry? This Community Planted an Entire Forest of Free Food
There are some 18.3 million Americans currently living in food deserts — low-income areas with limited access to a supermarket or other source of fresh food — which are more than a mile from a grocery store in urban areas, or more than 10 miles in rural communities, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. People who live in these areas are more likely to eat poor diets and to be at higher risk of becoming obese and developing chronic obesity-related diseases. Richmond is one of the most densely populated food deserts in the nation; many of its residents can’t afford a car or the bus fare necessary to reach a grocery store.
The problem with the food-desert epidemic is that there’s no clear solution — or at least not one that’s been adequately shown to work. Public health experts have been very good about accurately mapping the precise location of the country’s thousands of food deserts, but they haven’t been as successful in getting to the next step: identifying ways to shrink them. One obvious answer may be simply to build more grocery stores. In fact, in January, the House finally passed the farm bill, which included a provision for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative that will provide $125 million to fund the construction of healthy food retailers in underserved neighborhoods.
Improving food access helps. But recent research suggests that while building new grocery stores can increase people’s perceptions of healthy food availability in their community, it might not be enough to actually change their shopping behaviors. There are lots of reasons people shop and eat the way the way they do. It goes beyond mere access: They like buying their food from the same neighborhood store owner they’ve known for decades; and they like cooking and eating with their families and preserving their culinary traditions. They don’t particularly like it when outsiders drop in to wag their fingers and tell them to eat their fruits and vegetables.
ALSO: Want to Teach Kids About Food? Make Them Grow Their Own
That may help to explain Tricycle Gardens’ success. Rather than building an invasive, new superstore, the nonprofit is wisely using the resources Richmond already has. Tricycle Gardens’ Get Fresh East End! initiative gets affordable, organic and delicious foods to low-income communities through existing channels — the Quick Mart and, about 2 miles northwest, the Clay Street Market. All the produce comes from Tricycle Gardens’ half-acre, high-yield urban farm in the nearby Manchester neighborhood. Opened in 2010, it produces 20,000 pounds of food a year. “There’s incredible flavor in locally grown food that hasn’t been trucked across countries or states,” says Tricycle Gardens’ executive director, Sally Schwitters. “One thing you can’t outsource is locally grown food.”
Tricycle’s program coordinator Claire Sadeghzadeh interacts directly with the corner store owners and personally delivers their produce twice weekly. On average, she drops off anywhere from $4 to $12 worth of fruits and vegetables per delivery at each store and constantly monitors which items are selling and which aren’t. She says Get Fresh East End! — which is supported in part by Virginia Community Capital, another nonprofit working to increase food access — plans to expand to eight additional stores by the end of 2014. “I think it helps dispel that myth that low-income families don’t eat healthy or that they don’t want healthy food,” Sadeghzadeh says. “And we know that they do. I think it’s superpowerful to see that all of our produce is pretty much sold out every week.”
Quick Mart’s Nasher, who has started cooking for himself using the produce at his store, says “it would be great” to see more shops in the area carrying fresh, locally grown food from the nonprofit. “I’m here to help the community,” says Nasher, who moved to the United States from Yemen in 2003. “To get fresh fruits and vegetables has been amazing.”
At the same time that it’s increasing healthy food access, Tricycle Gardens is also working hard to reconnect local growers with their buyers. People become more mindful of what they eat when they know where their food is coming from — even more so when they’re taught how to cook it properly. Tricycle Gardens offers various classes for community members, so they can learn how to prepare their produce — everything from bell peppers, onions and cucumbers to squash and eggplant — once it’s obtained. “The distribution is critical, but complementing that with education and outreach events — to show that preparing this great food can be easy and affordable, great fun and incredibly delicious — is where we know the changes that we hope to see can happen,” Schwitters says.
MORE: Treehugger’s Nirvana Opens in Washington State
One especially rewarding moment sticks out in her mind. Tricycle Gardens set up a stand at the Greater Fulton Community Health Fair last May, and offered local residents a fresh salad from the farm. A mother and son approached the stand; Schwitters handed the child a bowl. The salad was full of food that kids love to hate: raw kale and collard greens, topped with broccoli and carrots.
“Oh, he’s not going to eat that,” the mother said.
“Well, let me just hand it to him and if he doesn’t eat it, that’s fine. We’ll compost it and it’ll go back into our garden,” Schwitters said.
Schwitters says she turned away for a brief conversation with the boy’s mom, and when she turned back, the salad was gone. He wanted seconds. “We see this time and time again,” says Schwitters, whose grandfather was a farmer. “It’s very different eating freshly grown broccoli that has a crunch and a sweetness and a beauty to it, as opposed to that mush that comes out of a frozen bag.”
Tricycle Gardens, which has a full-time staff of just four and draws on a network of nearly 500 volunteers and interns, runs a year-round weekly farm stand and helps maintain five community gardens and three learning gardens, which provide ample opportunities for children at schools and community centers to connect with the food they eat. With its partners, the Bon Secours Richmond Health System and the Children’s Museum of Richmond, the nonprofit also runs two healing gardens, spaces for reflection and solitude. The food from the healing gardens further helps feed employees of the health system and museum.
“We want to share the magic of looking at a tiny seed and wondering how, with a little love and sunshine and a home in some beautifully composted soil, this could become something that ends up feeding you,” Schwitters says. “That connection lasts a lifetime.”
DON’T MISS: Why It’s Time to Forget About “Food Deserts”

Why One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Fertilizer

Posted on December 12, 2013 by robbie

Hello Compost, a new initiative preparing to launch in (where else?) New York City, wants to give people fresh produce in exchange for their food scraps. Here’s how it works: Hello Compost will give participants freezable bags to collect their food scraps, which can then be exchanged for credits toward buying fresh produce from local farmers. The food scraps will then be used to create compost to grow more plants. The idea is to reduce the amount of waste going into landfills, while making healthy food less expensive for low-income communities, and increasing the supply of compost to improve the quality of future crops.